


Your Hand of Gold

by pineapplecrushface



Series: Movement [3]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Fillory, M/M, Margo's Day, Mosaic Universe, Physical Cottage times, Quentin does not get dicked down in a car, fingers - Freeform, post-monster
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-03
Packaged: 2020-01-01 13:34:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18335348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pineapplecrushface/pseuds/pineapplecrushface
Summary: Meditations on Eliot's fingers.





	Your Hand of Gold

Sometimes when Eliot wasn’t looking, or even sometimes when he was, Quentin liked to watch him move. It calmed him somehow, the way it was calming to watch a perpetual motion machine. Quentin moved through the world like he was in a constant state of leaning back in a chair that was about to tip over, so it was a pleasure to watch Eliot’s body even when he did nothing more than stand in one spot. There was something fine at work under his skin, and when he touched Quentin it spread to him too, something warm and graceful. Really, it wasn’t his body, it was just him, the way he seemed to always inhabit a space that was more beautiful than anyone else’s. And he liked being around Quentin. As weird as it seemed, this strange artwork of a person actually seemed like he wanted to be Quentin’s friend.

“Okay, _what_ are you looking at?” Eliot asked him one evening in the Physical Cottage when he was fixing a drink. He had been working at it for half an hour, tasting and then shaking his head, tasting again, weighing with a considering look on his face, shaking his head again. Quentin calculated seven drinks rejected so far and wondered what would make the grade. What made the grade for Eliot, period, he wondered? Something very, very nice, he thought. High quality. Fine and icy and beautiful.

“Watching you waste perfectly good alcohol, that’s all,” Quentin said. He didn’t even mind being teased about his marginal social skills, not when Eliot had that little smile that said he was watching Quentin too even if his eyes weren’t on him.

“One must break a few vodka eggs in pursuit of the perfect alcoholic omelet,” Eliot said. “Which sounds disgusting, but I’ve made one and it’s amazing.”

Quentin went back to his book with a smile on his face, unaccountably cheered just by having Eliot bustle around near him. There were other people in the room, and they even spoke to Eliot once in a while, asking him if he would let them be taste testers, but Quentin barely noticed them. They were nice people, but they were shadows compared to Eliot and Margo. It wasn’t their fault; he was a shadow too. Not everyone could be technicolor.

After a while Eliot made a satisfied little tsk. “Fucking finally,” he said, climbing over the back of the couch to sit beside Quentin. He held out a pale purple drink.

Quentin reached for it, but Eliot yanked it back as his fingers brushed the stem.

“Have you eaten anything today?” he asked. Quentin opened his mouth to say yes, although he wasn’t sure about that, but Eliot shoved the glass into his hand. “Just kidding. No amount of food will protect you. I already know you’re a lightweight, little baby.”

Quentin’s face went hot for reasons he didn’t really feel like thinking about at all, and he took two deep gulps to hide it. “Holy—holy,” he choked out.

“Yes,” Eliot said, patting his leg and looking at the book spread out over Quentin’s lap. “What are you nerding about?”

“I’m, uh,” Quentin said, still reeling. “I’m trying to figure out how to do this spell to make a horse out of a crystal.”

“Very grandma’s china cabinet,” Eliot said, sipping.

“It’s for Alice,” he admitted.

“Very grandma’s china cabinet,” Eliot said. “But with sex this time.”

“Oh, shut up,” Quentin said, laughing. “I just can’t figure out this last little bit. It keeps collapsing at the end.”

Eliot twisted to peer over his shoulder, and set both their drinks down on the floor. Somehow he never worried about spilling, and it occurred to Quentin that Eliot probably charmed all his drinks so they would never be knocked over.

“Show me what you’re doing,” he said, plucking an ice cube from Quentin’s glass and sticking it into his mouth before he set it on the table. “Here, do it on the ice.”

“I, uh, okay,” Quentin said, still seeing the ice cube sliding in and out of Eliot’s mouth. He shook his head a little and moved his fingers into a bridge, then pulled the index fingers away and together again, over and over as the cube shivered into something shaped like a horse, then fell apart.

“Mm,” Eliot said, shaking his head. “No, your fingers are too stiff. Loosen them up and do it like this.”

He grabbed Quentin’s fingers and shook them as if airing out a blanket, then popped another ice cube into his mouth and set it on the coffee table. He held up his hands and waited for Quentin to mimic him, then showed him the same movement, with his index fingers sliding smoothly together instead of tapping, as Quentin had done. Quentin tried to follow but Eliot shook his head again.

“Like this,” he said, putting his hands over Quentin’s, fingers laid on top of fingers. He pushed Quentin’s index fingers down and then slowly moved them together. Quentin watched, mesmerized, his mouth dropping open. Eliot’s face was close to his and he could smell the light cologne he liked to wear, a scent he sometimes caught and wanted to find more of. “It’s like you’re knitting your fingers together.”

“Yeah,” Quentin said thickly, and when Eliot pulled away he did it on his own, watching the horse appear from the melting ice cube. It lifted itself up when Quentin was finished, shook out its ice tail, and galloped off the table, shattering on the floor.

“From triumph to tragedy,” Eliot said, putting Quentin’s drink back in his hand and clinking them together. Quentin nodded jerkily and sipped too fast again.

The words burst out of him, as they sometimes did around Eliot. “I really just like hanging out with you,” he said. God, was he already drunk?

“I really just like hanging out with you too,” Eliot said, amused—but in a nice way. He put an arm around Quentin’s shoulders and pulled him in for a nice, tight squeeze, nothing stingy about his hugging at all. Quentin was grinning when he pulled away, and enjoyed the way his skin buzzed where Eliot had touched him while he continued studying.

*

They fought a lot the first few years they worked on the mosaic. It was probably a normal amount, he thought, trying to imagine how it would have worked out with anyone else. Margo? They would never have gotten to the fighting point. As Eliot had pointed out, she would have blown the thing up within days, and sold Quentin to a traveling band even before that just to get him out of her hair. He liked to think he and Alice wouldn’t have fought, but if she hadn’t figured out some brilliant way to bypass the work of just doing the damn puzzle over and over, he knew they would have been at each other’s throats constantly. He had enough distance to realize that now. Julia he probably would have fought with least because they knew each other’s tempers so well, but he had a feeling Julia, practical to the end, would have gone off on a tear once Quentin broke down how long it would take to get through all the mosaic’s permutations. There was no way she’d stick around to do something factually impossible, not when she could find a better way. No, it was best that it was Eliot, which was something he held onto even when there was no one he wanted to be around less.

Quentin’s anger was sullen and occasionally explosive but rarely directed toward anyone; Eliot’s turned inward. Unless they were fighting, and then they were experts at digging viciously at each other until they were furious and crying (Quentin) or furious and silent (Eliot). Years passed before they learned to fight without intending to wound each other. Arielle brokered some uneasy peace treaties, but really, it was having Teddy that forced them into it. Neither of them wanted him to grow up watching that, and slowly, _slowly_ he learned to stop himself before he let something nasty spill out of his mouth. _I used to enjoy tearing into you like that_ , he confessed to Eliot when they were older. _Me too_ , Eliot said. _I don’t know why I wanted to just completely crush you into nothing when I love you so much. I probably thought I’d find something that would finally drive you away for good_. 

When they weren’t fighting, however, it didn’t take long for Eliot to figure out how to jolly him out of a bad mood. Quentin was slower on the uptake. Not that Eliot was all that much better at emotions than he was—they were both terrible—but all anyone had to do to improve Quentin’s mood was to be nice to him, which always took the air out of his anger and left him feeling stupid and remorseful. Eliot, on the other hand, would withdraw and push away. He wasn’t unkind about it, but there was a thick wall around his thoughts and feelings. Confronting it got Quentin exactly nowhere. Firm discussion got him nowhere. Being sweet to him, the way Eliot was sweet when it was the other way around, got him somewhere, but that somewhere was usually in bed, and that was obviously nice but didn’t help. Much.

He finally figured it out somewhere in their second year, before Arielle but well after he probably should have. There was a stretch of almost three weeks where Eliot simply would not work on the mosaic. In about a year Quentin would go through his own period of refusing to even look at it, and by mutual agreement they decided they would never admit it to anyone else, but at the time Quentin couldn’t understand and no amount of shouting, “What the fuck, Eliot? What the _fuck_?” earned him any answers.

“I guess,” he said on the morning of the twelfth day, “I’m just going to have to save us by myself, _like I always do_.”

Eliot, on his back on the little bed they had constructed for the times when one of them needed to be alone at night, or wanted to work without disturbing the other, or when they wanted to sleep under the stars together, spared him one incredulous look before he closed his eyes and ignored him.

For the first hour of mosaic work, placing green and yellow and red and white in rows, then undoing it when he got it wrong and redoing it, his mental arguments were logical. _Eliot_ , he would say, _we are never going to get out of here if you can’t take the fucking time to help me. It’s your fucking turn to write down this pattern. It’s your fucking turn to do all of it, Eliot. I can’t do this by myself and I fucking hate you right now_. But as the sun crept into the sky and he saw that Eliot was simply staring up at it, he felt himself softening. He knew that look. More than that, he knew the feeling that came with that look.

He dusted his hands on his thighs and crawled over to the bed, putting a hand over Eliot’s, which lay loosely against his stomach. Eliot turned his head just enough to see him, and whatever he saw in Quentin’s face made him smile a little.

“I’m sorry,” Quentin said, drawing Eliot’s hand to his lips and kissing the knuckles, brushing them against his cheek. “Tell me whenever you feel like it, and if you never do, that’s all right.”

That evening Eliot actually got out of bed to help him make dinner, which might or might not have been an act of self-preservation, but Quentin was counting it as a win anyway. He still wouldn’t help with the mosaic, going instead for long walks around the forest and even once to Whitespire. He told Quentin about his adventures but wouldn’t touch the tiles, and finally on the twentieth evening he lay down beside Quentin and put his head on his chest.

It was not at all his usual style. He had two preferred sleeping positions: wrapped around Quentin and not entirely wrapped around Quentin. Sometimes Quentin was startled awake by Eliot rolling onto his back and flinging a hand out to hold onto him. There were the occasional nights when they fell asleep in separate beds, or facing each other, or when Quentin fell asleep on top of him—secretly his favorite; Eliot was bony but surprisingly comfortable—but in general, Eliot preferred to be the holder and not the one held. He wasn’t like Quentin and didn’t seek comfort like this, much as Quentin might have wanted him to.

“Hey,” he said, not wanting to startle him.

“It’s Bambi’s birthday tomorrow,” Eliot said, his voice soft and far away, and Quentin understood everything. He tightened his arms around him and kissed the top of his head.

“What did you do for the last birthday you were together?” he asked.

“I flew her around New York,” Eliot said. “Then we went to a banshee club and I don’t remember what happened after that.”

“Well, we basically just have weird vegetable wine and some cakes,” he said. “But we could celebrate her anyway. Take the day off tomorrow. Make it Margo’s Day.”

Eliot was quiet for a while, sliding his hand under Quentin’s shirt to run his fingers along his skin. Absently, he tugged on the hair on his stomach.

“Ouch, stop,” he said, squirming.

“You like that.”

“Yeah,” he said. “And I’m trying to be serious, not get you to touch my dick. Well, I mean, if you want to touch it you can.”

“If Margo were here, she’d be so pissed if I didn’t touch your dick to celebrate her,” Eliot said. “I know we said we weren’t going to both get shitfaced at the same time in case we messed up the mosaic, but maybe just this once.”

“Maybe we can find that guy who sells the plant we got during the dick harvest,” Quentin said.

“Mmm, dick harvest.” Eliot’s hand was definitely sliding downward, and Quentin didn’t mind at all. He loved to watch the way Eliot’s fingers spread across his stomach, big hands on his thighs, around his cock.

“It’s no orgy, but I bet,” Quentin gasped, jerking his hips up. “ _Oh_. I bet we can do her proud.”

“A million fucks for Bambi,” Eliot murmured against Quentin’s chest. “Long may she reign.”

*

There was a long period of time—at least it seemed long, but he had watched the sun go down and it was night now and he was pretty sure he’d been awake too long to comprehend the passage of time anymore—where he stood by the window in Kady’s apartment and just stared. There was a tiny chip in the window to his left, where the Monster had thrown a bottle of Julia’s orange juice at it months before. Quentin had cleaned it up before anyone else saw. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t want the others to know about the orange juice. He just didn’t.

Behind him, Eliot walked to one of the bar stools and sat down. He knew it was Eliot’s tread and not the Monster’s, and the fact that he could tell made him want to slide down onto the floor and just put his face there and stay there and live there. Be a Quentin floor troll. He would stay in this spot waiting for people to walk on him and demand a toll of not ever fucking making him do anything ever again.

“Hey,” Eliot said.

“Yeah, uh, hey,” Quentin said, with a little twitch of a look over his shoulder.

“So…Margo said you went a little bit Quentin,” Eliot said. “Are we talking Quentin read the Fillory books seventy times in a row or Quentin let Alice the Niffin live in his back?”

Quentin turned one half a step so he could see Eliot out of the corner of his eye. He was so used to not really looking at the Monster that he still couldn’t get the hang of staring at Eliot full on, and he thought it was a good thing because it hurt. A full dose would probably kill him right now. He would have to build up his resistance again, he thought, and felt his control slip a little bit at the thought.

“I did what I had to do,” he said.

“So maybe more toward the Niffin one, then,” Eliot said.

“I just, you know, I’ve lived in a world where there’s no Eliot before,” he said, folding his arms around his torso until he was as contained as he could be, withdrawing and withdrawing until he felt like he was about to become a black hole. “I didn’t like it, so.”

Eliot tilted his head, disturbingly like the Monster in Quentin’s peripheral vision—but no, Eliot’s face and the Monster’s face were never really the same. They were different under the skin. Eliot looked at him a thousand times more pointedly than anyone else, let alone the Monster. Quentin felt the gaze on the side of his face and had a brief little fantasy about being the floor troll again. Floor trolls probably didn’t have to do mirror magic ever, he thought, and was suddenly very emotional about it. Poor floor trolls, he thought, his eyes stinging. Poor Quentin trolls.

“You were alive for a while after I was, weren’t you,” Eliot said. “How long?”

He shrugged. “A year or two.” One year, three months, three days.

“ _Q_ ,” Eliot said, and yeah, that was a face the Monster had never made and could never. That was Eliot, who knew him better than anyone else, even Julia, and okay, yes, he had turned him down so flat Quentin was still dizzy from it, but Eliot’s friendship was a deep and abiding thing. He might not love Quentin the way he had in the other timeline, but he did love him as a friend, and Quentin was pretty well practiced at focusing on the love he did have.

“I went for a lot of walks that we never got to go on while we were working on the mosaic,” he said. He could hear his voice trembling a little and tried to clamp down on it. “And I taught all the grandkids how to sing ‘Tubthumping’ to annoy your spirit.”

“I would say I’m upset by your betrayal, but I’m pretty sure singing is not what you taught those poor children,” Eliot said.

They were quiet for a while, but not the comfortable quiet he was used to with Eliot. He stared out the window again, chewing on his thumb, while Eliot moved around and cleared his throat every so often behind him.

“Q,” Eliot said, and for a wonder, he sounded nervous. “Quentin.”

Quentin shuddered. “Maybe don’t use my full name for a while, okay?”

“Did I—?” Eliot cleared his throat again, but he sounded less awkward and more upset. “I’m really going to need you to tell me everything he did while he was me, at some point, but…not right now. Right now I have to say something.”

Quentin was about to tell him he didn’t have to, but realized he wanted to hear anything Eliot said, forever. Any words he wanted to say, even if they were terrible. “Okay,” he said, turning again. He tried for a little more visibility and realized he could handle it. Baby steps, he thought, and then turned all the way around, because he didn’t want baby steps. He wanted Eliot.   

Eliot opened his mouth and closed it a couple of times, and finally said, “How long has it been since you slept?”

He looked down at his shoes. Maybe the same shoes? No, no, they were not the same. They were both black but one had a taller heel and hit him higher on the ankle. Well, that explained a lot about the last twelve hours. “I think it’s been a while,” he said.

“Do you…would you feel comfortable…sleeping next to me?” Eliot asked. He was toying with the drawstring of a pair of—those were Quentin’s pajama pants, he realized with a hot flush of pleasure. They were huge on him and just barely fit Eliot. The shirt—not a t-shirt, thank fucking Christ, just a long-sleeved shirt that looked soft—was probably from Penny. He had no idea at all where Eliot’s clothes were now. All those beautiful vests, he thought, and realized his face was crumpling.  

“Yeah,” he said, voice quivering. “I’m probably not going to be okay letting you out of my sight for about a year, sorry.”

“Yeah, well, Margo already put a tracing spell on me,” Eliot said. “Actually, I asked her to. I think I’m not going to be okay with being out of your sight for a while either.”

“I’m surprised she’s not here too,” Quentin said. Nobody was around at all. “Damn, I’m really out of it. Where did everyone go?”

“They wanted to give us time to talk.” Eliot closed his eyes briefly. “Which we will. After we both sleep. You seriously look like—do you remember the first time you tried to weed the garden?”

The spell was something he had tried to modify from something he vaguely remembered from a nature magic class. The original purpose was to pull vegetables from the ground, and he didn’t think he had ever really mastered it, which proved to be the case when he tried it on the one small bit of clover that poked out of the ground and yanked out the entire root system, spraying himself and the mosaic with a thick layer of dirt.

“I guess I could shower,” he said.

“Sleep first,” Eliot said, reaching out his hand.

He swayed toward Eliot before he had a chance to think about it, reaching for him with a stupid little noise that sounded like he was crying—he _was_ crying, he thought. Shit. Eliot grabbed his hand and pulled him close, and he went without any fear at all. There was nothing of the Monster here, not in his touch or in his smell or even in his voice. Quentin was completely enveloped in just Eliot, and whatever little shreds of control he had maintained were wiped away completely. His entire body felt like it had been clenched tight like a fist for six months and only released just now, and he sagged against Eliot hard.

“Sorry,” he said, struggling not to get anything on Penny’s shirt. He tried to imagine Penny’s face if his shirt had Quentin snot on it and his imagination balked in horror. “I just, I just want like _one_ quesadilla and five minutes of nobody killing anyone or like, maybe I just want to be a sea captain?”

“Oh yeah,” Eliot murmured against his temple. “Definitely time for bed. You’re going to have to walk with me, sweetheart, I can’t even carry you across the threshold. We’ll prop each other up.”

“Okay,” he said, and then laughed because he was crying and he knew it looked ridiculous, the two of them staggering together like they’d never walked before toward the bedroom he’d been using. When they finally reached the room, Eliot sat down on the edge of the bed and Quentin prepared to launch himself face first onto the blankets, but Eliot caught his arm.

“Shoes off,” he said, and Quentin kicked them into the corner. “Shirt off.”

“ _Sleep_ ,” Quentin said, but Eliot unbuttoned his shirt for him and that was…

“Pants off,” Eliot said. He didn’t even wait for Quentin to protest this time, which was good because Quentin was not about to protest. His pants were down and he was stepping out of them clumsily and then his knees were sinking into the soft blankets, surely one of the best feelings in the world. Then he pitched forward on the bed and was caught in Eliot’s arms and cradled tight.

He hadn’t worried at all about being afraid of Eliot holding him. For one thing, until this moment he wasn’t sure he’d ever feel it again. For another, while he’d only spent one night like this in his current timeline, he’d done it for an entire lifetime. It wasn’t something he was about to forget. He’d remember the first rays of the sun starting to scatter through the trees and the windows in the cottage, Eliot in the early sunlight smiling down at him with infinite affection, rubbing his cheek against Quentin’s like a drowsy cat. He’d remember the sex, yes, because he and Eliot were good together and it wasn’t like he’d had a lot of good sex in his life, but Eliot’s warm arms around him, the absolute safety there, that was the life-altering thing. He never felt safe. Was it even something he expected, ever? No. He expected that at some point in his life he would feel calm. Maybe…accomplished? Happy was probably out of the question, but he thought stretches of contentment were within his reach. Safe, though, that was for people who didn’t always know that everything was about to drop out from underneath them.

He was safe with Eliot. Completely, devastatingly safe, not just protected but also protector. He was enough of a…well, he was enough, they together were enough to banish a low-level (no, high-level) uneasiness that had always resided somewhere in his stomach when he was with someone, even someone he loved as much as he’d loved Alice. You expected a certain level of discomfort waking up after a one-night stand, but it was there for him no matter what, an element of _not-quite_ , a kind of enduring sadness that he just couldn’t ever fucking feel close to someone and that sex actually drove him farther away rather than bringing him closer.

With Eliot, that first time in the past, it was different. Different from their first time ever, different from any other time with anyone. He felt good right down to his bones—no doubt about it, Eliot had fucked him so thoroughly he was sort of demolished, in the very best way—but he knew something he hadn’t known even the day before. Or had he? Hadn’t he known for a while? It might have started from the moment Eliot had slid through the door of the Physical Cottage after being missing, presumed dead, for weeks and weeks. There was a little spark inside Quentin that had suddenly lit up bright, and stayed lit. Eliot was his friend and he loved him, with a love that had never quite settled into strictly friendship but never quite reached anything else until that moment. And now it wasn’t just a little spark but a sunrise, calm and gradual and perfect. Unstoppable.

“Eliot,” he said against Eliot’s clavicle.

“What, baby?” Eliot mumbled. Almost asleep, Quentin knew, or he wouldn’t have slipped like that. One hand pressed Quentin as close as he could get and the other was in his hair. No monsters. Just Eliot’s hands, Eliot’s arms, Eliot’s leg between his.

“Do you think I’d be a good floor troll?” he asked, and slept.

*

He wasn’t about to admit it to Margo, but he had managed to avoid every single Fillorian party or festival that had ever taken place. Every single one, including his own coronation party. Actually, that wasn’t entirely true—he had intercepted an orgy once, but then he killed the guest of honor, so he thought maybe that didn’t count. Everyone had stopped fucking by the time he’d gotten there anyway, which was kind of an uncomfortably accurate metaphor for his life.

He couldn’t get out of Margo’s Day, though. And if he had to be honest, he didn’t really want to. She was so delighted at the discovery of the old holiday, and he and Eliot hadn’t even told her how it had originated yet. Eliot was saving that for the evening, complete with a somewhat embellished reenactment by a troupe of actors he’d been working with for months. _It’s not flying her over New York with my own wings_ , he had said, _but I think she’ll like it_ , and Quentin had asked, _Wings_? but never received a satisfactory answer.

Some things never changed, he thought as the party really got started. He could be eighteen or ninety, and he’d still be the guy sitting in a chair on the edges of a party with a drink in his hand, watching his friends socialize. He was relaxed now, though. Late teens and early twenties Quentin had hated it, but present-day Quentin was enjoying himself, smiling and watching Margo drift through the banquet hall with her axes hanging from the special plates she had sewn into the backs of all her dresses. She and Fen greeted everyone together as high kings and then separately, while Eliot tried very hard not to insert himself into the greetings and failed. There were several delegations from factions of Loria, all of whom loved Eliot, and Quentin watched him gesticulate, sketching out something in the air that he eventually realized was a car. Eliot in a car, he thought idly, and then sat up straighter and thought about it with more purpose. Eliot in a _car_.

He’d never seen Eliot drive, he thought. He’d be a good driver, of course—Eliot played at being the kind of guy who’d shudder at the thought of looking under the hood of a car, but Quentin knew, he _knew_ Eliot knew his way around an engine, whether he wanted to or not. He loved Eliot’s persona, of course. It was Eliot as he wanted to be seen, and Quentin basked in the created parts as well as everything underneath. It was all Eliot, really. Half a century was barely enough to figure him out, but there were some things Quentin knew and one of those things was that Eliot was good at anything he put his hands to. He’d make driving look easy. Quentin, who had grown from an extremely anxious driver to a slightly less anxious driver, had a vision of Eliot’s long fingers on the wheel of a car, the entire elegant line of him in tune with the machine. He shivered all over and stared at Eliot almost without seeing him, his entire body suddenly alight. Eliot would push his sleeves up—Quentin fucking _loved_ when Eliot pushed his sleeves up—and he’d just…he’d just—

Eliot turned to him as if he knew exactly what Quentin was thinking and waved him over, and Quentin went as if dragged by a string, his legs wobbly.

“Hey,” he said, clipped, sliding his fingers around Eliot’s wrist. He felt twitchy, like he was making grabby motions and not quite getting what he wanted.

“Hey,” Eliot said, giving him one of those tiny little looks that combined curiosity and concentration and love. Whenever they kissed, he always seemed to be trying to figure Quentin out and liking whatever he discovered, which was gratifying. Afterward, anyway. In the moment, Quentin’s brain was usually pretty much static. Kind of like now.

“I, uh,” he said. He tugged on Eliot’s wrist, breathing too hard, and could see the moment Eliot caught on. That little _Well, what do we have here?_ look deepened and he bent his head down to murmur in Quentin’s ear, which was a smart move because Quentin wanted to _fucking_ _climb him_.

“Do you need something, Q?” he asked, somehow managing to loosen his arm from Quentin’s sex death grip until he was just holding his hand, stroking a thumb over his palm until the hair on the back of his neck felt like it was standing on end.

“Yes,” Quentin said curtly. “I need you to leave this room and come with me and fuck me.”

“All right,” Eliot said.

“Maybe in a car.”

“I can arrange that,” Eliot said, because of course he could. Quentin had perfect faith in him. His voice was mild, but his eyes were already hot and he had let go of Quentin’s hand and had an arm wrapped around his shoulders. It might have looked a normal, friendly gesture to anyone else—or it might have looked like what it was, which was Eliot pulling him close, soothing him and shielding him from everyone else so no one would see his eyes roll back and his knees give a little when Eliot kissed first his temple and then his ear. He hid his face in Eliot’s shoulder and reached out for the first thing he could hold onto, which was the silky material of his shirt, and caught his fingers in it.

“Can we do it _now_ , though?”

“Of course we can,” Eliot said, and turned, giving a nod to Margo. He steered Quentin out of the room with a hand on his back, always guaranteed to get him going, and into the chambers they had claimed once neither of them were kings any longer. Compared to Eliot’s high king bedchambers, which Quentin had crashed in more than once, they weren’t particularly grand—or they weren’t until Eliot and Margo had gotten hold of them, and now somehow they had a gold bedspread that felt like sleeping in a cloud. Sometimes Quentin slipped away from whatever they were doing just to curl up on the bedspread. Not even sleeping, just burrowed into it, wondering if he could have clothes made out of the material.

Eliot undid his shirt and hung it on the back of a chair, slid out of his pants, and sprawled out on the bed before Quentin had even realized what was happening. _How do you even do that_? he asked Eliot once. _Sleight of dick_ , Eliot had said.

“Come here, baby,” Eliot said, rubbing his thigh, and Quentin came there, already so painfully turned on that just those words were enough to make him give a little startled gasp of pleasure. Even if he hadn’t been strung so tight he was about to explode, he thought hearing Eliot say _Come here, baby_ would get him there. He’d go anywhere and do just about anything for it, that beautiful promise that sometimes surprised him into desperation out of nowhere. Even before his confused, jumbled desire coalesced into anything like action ( _That time you shoved me out of the way to get into Eliot’s lap like a greedy, dick drunk asshole_ , Margo called it), he would see Eliot smile a certain way at someone, a private little smile that reassured the recipient they would be getting their brains fucked out shortly, and for one second—or four, or twenty—he’d imagine himself in their place. He had wanted it bad. Still wanted it, bad.

“ _Eliot_ ,” he said, climbing onto the bed and straddling him. Eliot smiled and kissed him, slow, drawing it out, teasing him until Quentin was making soft impatient noises and rubbing against him, against the big, thick cock he could feel hard against his ass.

“We’re getting there,” Eliot said.

He reached for his shirt buttons—his shirt wasn’t as high quality as Eliot’s but it was still nice, and he liked the team of tailors far too much to make them fix one of his shirts for sex reasons more than once—but Eliot pushed his hands away. He liked to undress Quentin himself, always had. The shirt was gently draped over Eliot’s on the chair, and then he twisted until Quentin was under him and slid his pants off inch by inch until Quentin thought about kicking him. He really liked to make it last, to undo his zipper or his buttons so slowly while he kissed his way down Quentin’s stomach and sucked greedily at the tip of his cock. By the time his pants were all the way off, Quentin was sobbing and trying not to—it really was kind of humiliating that he got to this point every time, but Eliot was a fucking pleasure sadist and Quentin…guessed he kind of liked that.

“Now,” Eliot said, his hands low on Quentin’s back, tracing out the spell that would get him wet, “I think you said you wanted me to fuck you in a car.”

“ _No_ ,” Quentin said, clutching his arm. He could see Eliot kneeling and starting to do some spell that would take half an hour, and he was too far gone for that.

“No?” Eliot said, giving him that look that said he would do whatever Quentin wanted. “Next time then, maybe. I could fuck you amazingly well in the back of a Lincoln.”

“El, _please_ ,” he said. He scratched Eliot’s arm gently, and Eliot gave him that look again and nodded, spreading him with his fingers while Quentin gripped the bedspread, feet sliding all over it, moaning at an increasingly frantic high pitch. His palms were warm against the insides of Quentin’s thighs and then he was pressing his cock inside and sliding his arms around Quentin to hold him tight. Quentin tried to breathe through the initial overwhelming pressure, sharp and hot inside him, that always made him feel like he was going to come instantly. He opened his mouth against Eliot’s shoulder, teeth digging in just a little, and moaned through it, and when he had backed off Eliot picked up the rhythm and rolled his hips even and steady. Eliot kept him close, stroking his hair and his ear with one hand, making him absolutely mindless, and after a while he straightened up and gripped Quentin’s hips, pulling him onto his cock faster and faster.

It was almost too much for him to look down the length of his body and see his legs spread around Eliot’s hips, cock thick against his stomach, which was taut from the position and the anticipation, his own come smeared all over. He remembered the first time, how he’d gone red and mumbled _Jesus, that’s_ —and swiped his hand over the head of his cock, but Eliot had caught his hand and licked his fingertips slowly. _Don’t_ , he had said. _I like it. I like everything here. If you think it’s gross or weird—just don’t. You can’t do anything wrong. I want all of it_. The words—the words were good, but the look on his face, like he was so turned on he was about to eat Quentin up, that was so much better. Eliot didn’t lose his cool very often during sex and Quentin loved it when he did, daydreamed about it afterward with his stomach fluttering like he was fifteen and had a crush on a boy.

Eliot’s hands slid around to his lower back and pressed him closer, tipping his hips up so he could have greater control and drive in harder, and Quentin arched his back and shouted hoarsely over and over. It was a move that somehow always got him off right away, from the very first time, Eliot’s big hands holding him in place and a long slide of pleasure with each stroke. He was tensing up, everything going tight and brilliant, rushing hard into that space where every spot Eliot touched him felt so good he couldn’t think at all, could barely hear Eliot’s soft _Q, Q, baby, go on_ , and he came in between strokes, long hard spurts all over his stomach, all the way up his chest. Eliot held Quentin’s hand tight and came too, eyes closed tight, gasping. Quentin, shivering, kissed Eliot’s hand and held it against his face while they both slowed and tried to catch their breath.

“Sorry,” he said after a while, still panting. He wasn’t that sorry.

“You should be.” Eliot rubbed the tip of his nose against Quentin’s temple and stroked his hair from his damp forehead. “You got me interested in this car idea and then took it away again. I want to be high on gas fumes when I fuck you next time.”

“Mm, carbon monoxide could be very sexy,” he said, turning his face into Eliot’s hand. The look Eliot was giving him was even softer than before, the look he had only seen directed at himself or Margo. It sat well on him when his hair was wild after sex, his eyes sleepy. His fingers, slow and sweet against Quentin’s skin. This, Quentin thought, was why people just said I love you. It wasn’t adequate, but it covered enough to take the edge off.

Twenty minutes later, Eliot had rolled out of bed, dressed, and gotten his hair in order again before Quentin even had the energy to move his hands and clean up.

“Don’t fall asleep,” Eliot warned him with a kiss to the forehead and another to his bare stomach. “The play is starting soon, and I’m not saying there’s a complicated musical number that I composed myself, but I’m not _not_ saying that either.”

“All right, I’m on my way,” he said, waving him off. He made a good attempt at tucking his clothes back in as neatly as they had been before and tried to pull his hair back, and walked back out into the party hoping to find more of Josh’s lemon strawberry plum cake.

“Oh, honey,” Margo said as soon as she saw him.

“What?” he mumbled.

“Don’t act like you didn’t just get dicked into eternity,” she said. “Eliot looks relaxed and you look like somebody threw your skirts over your head and took you behind the barn.”

“I just need a nap.” Jesus, his voice was shot. He rubbed his hands over his face to try to wake up a little bit.

“You can leave after the musical number Eliot’s trying to keep a secret. You know, I was gonna fix your hair, but I think it’s kinda charming,” Margo said. “It’s a good thing you never wear makeup.”

He imagined himself suddenly, eyeliner smeared, the area around his swollen lips raw and pink from kissing, and went hot all over. “Yeah, good thing,” he said, touching his mouth without realizing it.

“Huh,” she said, looking him over. “Did I throw some spank bank material your way?”

“Oh my god,” he said, absolutely on fire.

“Looks like I did. Eliot can thank me later.” She got up, using her palm on his face as leverage, and left with a smile over her shoulder.

He watched her power through the room before she sat on her throne beside Fen, touching Fen’s wrist to get her attention. She leaned in and laughed, his favorite Margo laugh, low and dirty, and he suspected the joke was on him but didn’t feel too badly about it. The lights were dimming in the banquet hall and the red curtain was drawing back, revealing a little cottage and two men standing on either side of a little four-by-four checkerboard mosaic. Somehow Eliot had managed to find someone who could recreate the cottage door down to the handle, and Quentin’s breath caught in his throat, eyes racing over every inch of the scene. He turned to Eliot, who gave him a knowing look and nodded, and he nodded in return. It seemed as if Eliot had been waiting for his permission, because as soon as Quentin nodded, he turned to the musicians and signaled for the bugles to play a short note.

“It was the year the Northern Spire was finished,” Eliot began, “and two handsome young time travelers were starting to become despondent without their Bambi…”

**Author's Note:**

> I can sometimes be found on tumblr [here](https://pineapplecrushface.tumblr.com/).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] Movement series](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20004520) by [exmanhater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/exmanhater/pseuds/exmanhater)




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